Psychology in AfricaPsychology in Africa by Mallory Wober; African Social Psychology: A Review and AnnotatedBibliography by Michael ArmerReview by: Mary Stewart van LeeuwenCanadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 10, No. 3(1976), pp. 532-534Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/483809 .

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532 CANADIAN JOURNAL OF AFRICAN STUDIES

Psychology In Africa *

Mary Stewart VAN LEEUWEN**

On this side of the Atlantic especially, the lot of the cross-cultural psychologist (and particularly the African specialist) has until recently been a rather lonely one. North American psychology has been heavily dominated by behaviourist theoretical assumptions and by experimental and abilities-testing methodologies. Since each of these approaches to research psychology is largely American in origin, the disciple has suffered from an inevitable ethnocentrism: the hypotheses selected for testing, the populations sampled, and generalizations drawn from results have all tended to produce what has often been called "a psychology of white, male, American college sophomores." It has only been ten years since the inception of the International Journal of Psychology, the first one devoted specifically to cross-cultural research, and edited from the University of Louvain in Belgium. Even more recently, the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology published its first issue in 1971, from the Center of Cross-Cultural Psychology at Western Washington State College. Until very recently, University instructors wishing to set up courses in cross-cultural psychology have suffered from all of the drawbacks which attend the teaching of a newly-born sub-discipline: no texts or adequate bibliographies, few if any review papers to draw together and evaluate ongoing research, and the frustrations of tracking down many unpublished studies.

Only within the last few years has this situation begun to change in encouraging ways: in 1969, Hoorweg and Marais issued their bibliography, Psychology in Africa, from Leyden University in the Netherlands, and in 1970, Irvine, Sanders, and Klingelhofer (two Canadians and one American) published a second "bibliography of psychological and related writings" entitled Human Behaviour in African. Then collections of articles began to appear in textbook form: Price-Williams' Cross-Cultural Studies in 1969, Al-Issa and Dennis' Cross-Cultural Studies of Behaviour in 1970, Berry and Dasen's Culture and Cognition: Readings in Cross-Cultural Psychology in 1974. Finally, there have emerged some reasonable first attempts at integrated texts in English: from Britain, Barbara Lloyd's Perception and Cognition: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (1972) and Robert Serpell's Culture's Influence on Behaviour (1976); from America, Cole and Scribner's Culture and Tought: A Psychological Introduction (1974), and Munroe and Munroe's Cross-Cultural Human Development (1975).

Perhaps the greatest percentage of cross-cultural research in psychology has been, and continues to be done in Africa, and for this reason Africanists who are also interested in psychology can welcome the appearance of Mallory Wober's Psychology in Africa, which (to my knowledge) is the first attempt in English (but also covering the Francophone literature) to summarize and evaluate the research done in Africa from approximately the beginning of the century. It should be mentioned by way of clarification that there have existed side by side two somewhat mutually independent research traditions in psychology in Africa: the first of these, usually referred to as the "culture and personality" approach, draws heavily on psychoanalytic assumptions and methods, focuses mainly on socio-emotional aspects of behaviour, and has tended to become the province of cultural anthropologists more than of psychologists. The second, often labelled the "culture and cognition" approach, tries to approximate a more pure- science approach to research (in its techniques of sampling, experimental control, operationali- zation of variables, and statistical analyses of data), and in terms of subject-matter focuses on intellectual aspects of behaviour, including cognitive development, the definition and measure-

* Mallory Wober, Psychology in Africa, International African Institute (London), 1975, 247p.; Michael Armer, African Social Psychology: A Review and Annotated Bibliography, Africana Publishing Co., Holmes & Meier Publishers Inc., New York, 1975, 321p.

** Department of Psychology, York University,

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LIVRES / BOOKS 533

ment of abilities, and the measurement of attitudes. Wober's text leans heavily towards the latter tradition in its subject-matter, and in the standards of evaluation he applies, but also deals with research on infancy and weaning, vocational aspirations, personality and identity, and psychological adjustment to social change.

Wober addresses each topic of research in terms of the controversial questions which have motivated it: is it true that African infants are more precocious than Europeans in motor development, but less so in later cognitive development, and if so, what environmental influences (physical, intellectual, social) seem to be related to such differences? Is it ever even appropriate to measure African performance on western tests, or should psychologists bend their efforts to the development of tests which reflect whatever abilities a given culture does specifically foster ? To what extent do African populations, with their more limited traditions of writing and graphic representation, have special perceptual - cognitive difficulties with the interpretation of visual-pictorial material, for example, or special cognitive ability (for example in the auditory realm) as a consequence of coming from cultures which communicate more by way of conversation, singing, story-telling and music? To what extent does the gap between the promise of education and actual opportunity for upward mobility generate personal and political unrest? Can one speak at all of any sort of generic "African personality" ?

Research into any of these questions in Africa is invariably fraught with such a host of differing political assumptions and standards as to what constitutes valid evidence that Wober can be forgiven if his text reads at times like a mere catalogue of studies with no clear standard for evaluating them. However, with regard to certain issues, his preferences are clear; he has scant use for studies which approach African populations armed with western standards of performance. He points out, for instance, that the time - worn generalization that Africans "could not abstract" ignores the overwhelming degree of abstraction required by the use of language alone, and maintains (I think correctly) that "psychologists should concentrate on the circumstances in which people do use abstract conceptual behaviour and where people do not develop, or are hindered from developing habits of such behaviour." Elsewhere he points out repeatedly that tests from Europe and America have been applied to African populations without regard for the latter's familiarity with (or interest in) the test materials (pencils, jig-saw puzzles, two-dimensional drawings, etc.) or standards of performance (speed, errors, etc.)

At times, however, his criticisms of colleagues' sins in this respect are unnecessarily acid and ad hominem, especially when their targets are South African or American. For instance, he marvels that a trio of American researchers attempting to assess intelligence in Guinea were astonished that testees did not even understand how to approach a jigsaw nor a digit-symbol substitution task. Wober comments: "Instead of showing the vaunted western intellectual quality of adaptiveness, which would have led them to change their tests long before boring the 50th child, the experimenters persisted and thought it worthwhile to work out 'quotients' on their data." Elsewhere he criticizes what he calls the "centri-cultural" approach to traditiona- lism and modernity, which conceives of absolute definitions of modernity and usually identifies the concept with westernism, urbanization, or "civilization." In his summary of the research on these topics, he points out that it is the non-Commonwealth (read: American) researchers who have tended to adopt centri-cultural assumptions, while researchers of Commonwealth origin have adhered to a more culturally relativistic strategy, exploring how identifiably traditional and western attitudes "meet to produce new patterns of mind which face the task of reconciling both influences." Although he hastens to say that this pattern is most likely due to coincidence, the negative innuendo remains uppermost in the reader's mind, as it does when he criticizes conclusions drawn from research on geometric illusion susceptibility by saying that "the main illusion here seems to have afflicted the (American !) psychologists in their zeal to assimilate data to patterns with which they felt familiar and comfortable."

It is true that the difficulties of doing rigorous psychological research in Africa and the paucity of studies done thus far should lead researchers to generalize from results to theoretical conclusions only with extreme caution. However, Wober is not guiltless of supporting hasty

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534 REVUE CANADIENNE DES ETUDES AFRICAINES

generalizations where they happen to accord with his own assumptions. His chapter on "special abilities" develops his own notion of "sensotypes" - the idea that while westerners may have

apparently - superior visual skills as a result of the cultural demands placed on them, Africans in turn may be characterized by an auditory and/or proprioceptive "sensotype" as a result of their own particular cultural experiences. While he admits that there is scant evidence as yet for this intriguing McLuhan-esque typology, he again attributes the slowness of researchers to

explore African auditory skills to their own centri-cultural concentration only on the skills

pertinent to survival in their home milieu. His criticisms of western-biased research certainly do need to be made, but his manner of making them results in the impression of a simplistic good guys/bad guys dichotomy of the very kind he deplores among ethnocentric researchers who

always "happen" to find that Africans' abilities are inferior to those of non-Africans. Despite Wober's tendency to polemicize in the ways described above, his book stands as a

laudable effort to bring together the published (and much hard-to-find unpublished) psychologi- cal research in Africa in a very clearly-written manner. The book's cover suggests that it will be "invaluable... to African students beginning a degree course in psychology." I would tend to

agree; Wober's writing style has a clear, patient quality which links details of studies to theoretical concepts with a rare lucidness. In addition, he gives much parenthetical instruction on the details of tests and on methodological issues about which other writers tend too easily to assume familiarity on the part of their readers. This makes it an excellent text not only for African students who deserve the courtesy of clearly-written texts if they are not in their native

language, but for western students in cross-cultural psychology courses and indeed, for any Africanist of a non-psychology background who desires a comprehensive but not overly-jargon introduction to psychological research in Africa.

Michael Armer's African Social Psychology: A Review and Annotated Bibliography draws on previous bibliographic sources (including the two mentioned above), but goes beyond them in supplying abstracts as well as references for the majority of entries. The term "social" psychology in the title is somewhat misleading, as the book covers much the same range of material as Wober's text, and in addition such areas as education, religion and research methodology. However, given the author's very broad definition of social psychology as including both personality and socio-cultural variables, this range of topics is not surprising. The promised "review" of the title is also somewhat misleading, as it amounts only to an 11

page introduction which concentrates mainly on the lay-out of the bibliography section by section, with no real attempt at a critical assessment of the literature. However, the annotated bibliography of 863 references should prove to be another welcome weapon in the cross-cultural psychologists' until-recently scattered armoury. Where possible, original abstracts of articles have been used with only minor modifications, thus protecting the reader from overexposure to Armer's own prejudices although preserving those of the original articles intact. As in Wober's text, both Anglophone and Francophone sources are included, the latter through use of the files of CARDAN (Centre d'analyse et de recherche documentaires pour l'Afrique noire) and IFAN (Institut fondamental d'Afrique noire). The bibliography is far from exhaustive, and does not claim to be, (for instance, the author has not even directly covered the contents of the International Journal of Psychology or the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology) but at this point in the history of cross-cultural, and more specifically Africa-based psychology, any and all attempts to bring together even parts of a much-scattered literature are to be welcomed, and Armer is to be thanked as one of a handful of patient pioneers whose hours in the reference library will spare the time and efforts of many of his colleagues.

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